Walking around town

We haven't set out to do any sightseeing as of yet. I've been to Paris enough to have ticked most of the boxes anyway. Still yesterday on our way to get a convertor adaptor for my laptop charger we had to go to the Louvre. The Louvre is the kind of place you have to go once in your life, I.M. Pei's striking entrance still seems eclipsed by the ostentatious palace that Louis XIV thought seemed a little too small and thus had Versaille built. La Jaconde (Mona Lisa) is the size of piece of printer paper and it seems that most people, need to see it in order to belief it's lack of imposing authority. But the Apple store, imposing as ever, is of course, in the Carousel de Louvre, where else would Apple be after all. Still it was about a third as grand and glorious as any of the Apple stores in Manhattan.

We also passed by the Opera House which holds up the standard of ornate French architecture. The other day I was writing about the graffiti that degraded the beauty of the city and after talking to a girl at Maxim's who was telling me how much she loved London and the spirit and energy there it got me thinking about why London can better incorporate it's street art. In general London is much more rugged. It's architecture is austere in comparison, Christopher Wren and his contemporaries were busy crunching numbers and doing geometry trying to compose perfect proportions and perfect seriousness. The buildings are old and English, flat walled facades with greek columns and everything was quite ordered and conservative. I believe it's because of this order and lack of ornament that as time has taken its tole contemporary artists have been able to use it as a somewhat blank canvas. In France ornamentation abounds, building tops, window guards and whatever else might do nicely with a flamboyant flourish got one or two. So even though time has passed as the old saying goes you can't mix patterns and stripes.